Murray Ball: Tarzan, Kelly and Me

By GILBERT WONG

Post Footrot Flats Murray Ball's cartoons have assumed a ribald life that is quite out of step with the tone of these times. Ball takes delight in drawing voluptuous, big-bosomed women with pouty lips and sultry, bovine eyes. These women feature widely in this semi-autobiographical work on the influences that made Murray a man. He runs through a series of names, from those in the title, to 60 sex symbols, Brigitte Bardot to Sophia Loren.

His adolescent fantasising will bring a grin of self-recognition to those who recall the almost overpowering sexual frustration that strikes teenage males.

And for those who began their careers in journalism before you needed a degree for it, Ball's experiences at the Dominion as a cadet reporter will recall the numbing fear that you were responsible for writing about something you knew nothing about while older, more grizzled hands shouted and swore.

Ball lasted three months on the "night train" shift, making those late-night lonely emergency calls around the country. He then quit, more from nervous exhaustion than anything, to return to the Manawatu where the local paper resurrected his confidence with a job as cartoonist. Ball has never looked back.

This is an honest self-examination. Ball writes that he is embarrassed that he presumed to one day be a Gainsborough when all he wanted to do was follow his heroes, cartoonists and illustrators like Giles, Searle and Charles Schulz.

Few would dispute that is the place Ball occupies in this country - a cartoonist whose work lies embedded in our consciousness.

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* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland journalist.